The Dream of My Return

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  “You look a little worse. Has the pain come back?” he asked me even before we’d sat down in the library. No, I answered, fortunately the stabbing pain had not come back—that was all I needed—but I’d been beset by so many troubles all week that I hadn’t even remembered the pain, because my relationship with my partner, I told him, had collapsed, not because of my upcoming trip but because of the entrance on stage of a two-bit actor she’d had an affair with, I confessed, and I had the impression that he lifted his eyes slightly, as if to look for the horns on my head, though Don Chente would have been incapable of such a thing, he was much too discreet. He asked me, with as much tact as possible, if Eva had persisted in her lapse, using the word “lapse” as if she had simply taken a misstep and tripped and fallen on her back with her legs spread-eagle so he could penetrate her, hardly what had really happened, with her going off enthusiastically for her early morning fucks, but I refrained from making my accusation too specific and answered only, no, apparently the affair had ended, though when dealing with that kind of sleazy activity it was difficult to know for certain. He asked how I had reacted, perhaps fearing that violence had carried the day, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I had behaved in a more civilized way than usual, having reached the conclusion that we had no future as a couple. “What does she think?” he asked, a look of concern spreading across his face. I told him I still didn’t understand her, sometimes she’d assert with conviction that everything was over, but at other times she’d say the opposite, which to my mind meant that she was terribly confused, which had made it impossible for us to hold a calm and reasonable conversation, as was necessary under the circumstances. “Try not to make precipitous decisions; remember there is a young child involved,” Don Chente said, picking up his fountain pen to write something down in his notebook.

  What I didn’t reveal to Don Chente, because I didn’t see the point, was that Eva had come home one evening after our last appointment unusually agitated, which made me suspect that she had returned to her adventures with said two-bit actor, so I told her off, sarcastically suggesting that she had traded her libidinous morning escapades for afternoon ones, to which she reacted with a rather disproportional expression of indignation, according to my standards, thereby increasing my suspicions and prompting me to remind her that there was no need to get violent, as far as I was concerned she could do with her ass whatever the hell she wanted and with whomever she wanted. I was afraid this would make her even more belligerent, but the opposite occurred: she went and sat down in the armchair facing the sofa where I was sitting and began to cry, quietly at first and then uncontrollably, so pitifully that I soon cast off my suspicions that she was employing a typical feminine strategy and asked her what was going on, because by now I was a bit alarmed, my intuition having warned me that so much crying could not possibly bode well for me. Sniffling, her hands covering her face, she said: her period was a week late and she was afraid she was pregnant. Flabbergasted, I sat bolt upright, and long seconds passed before I could muster my voice; my insides were being buffeted about by contradictory emotions, and although her sorrowful cries had awoken my compassion, the idea that she was pregnant with the other man’s child filled me with so much rage that I thought I was going to explode—I had the urge to kick the hell out of her that very moment—after all, a roll in the hay was one thing and getting pregnant quite another. I asked her if she’d done a test. She said, no, she would the next day, and she explained that she should have gotten her period exactly eight days before, but because of her symptoms she was almost positive—and I understood that “almost” as a final line of defense that not even she believed—she was pregnant. “When was the last time you fucked your actor?” I asked with consummate scorn. She stopped crying, lowered her hands, and looked at me with hatred. “We always used a condom,” she mumbled. “So, whose is it?” I asked, my mind stuck on the word always that she had uttered so naturally and which led me to infer that those two lewd mornings she had sold me on were nothing but cheap consolation for a poor cuckold and that I’d never know how many times she had actually given herself to that two-bit actor. “What do you mean, whose?!” she shouted, furious, but at that point it really was an act, because as far as I could remember, the times we had fornicated in the last few months had been few and far between—busy as she was frolicking in someone else’s bed—and on those few occasions, Eva had assured me that she was not in the fertile part of her cycle. “Idiot!” she snarled, then started sobbing again.

  Nor would I tell Don Chente about my via crucis over the following days, when the test came back positive, and thus began the bitter discussion about how to proceed; an abortion seemed to me to be the preferred course of action from every possible point of view, whereas Eva, due to her natural feminine protective instinct, declared somewhat tentatively that she was in favor of keeping the child, though she wavered between that position and mine, constantly bursting out in tears so as to stoke my feelings of guilt, even though she was the only possible guilty party, no matter what, whether the child was mine because she had lied to me about her supposed infertility or, more likely, that due to the excitement and urgency of her initiation into adultery, she’d failed to take the necessary precautions and now the spawn of that circus performer was growing in her belly. But the question of culpability wasn’t really the issue, because I was about to leave the country and end my relationship with her, a forceful enough argument in itself against the advisability of any pregnancy, a pregnancy she would have to go through alone and without any support from me, unless she was in cahoots with her two-bit actor, which I asked her about more than once, in which case they might as well leave me out of their soap opera; but Eva stuck to her guns, repeating that there was nothing between her and Antolín, and that the baby was mine, she had no doubt about it, the two times they’d slept together they’d used condoms, and she repeated this with so much conviction that I was on the verge of believing how many times she had lapsed, as Don Chente called it, but not that they’d used a condom, as I told her in no uncertain terms, and for that very reason I’d take no responsibility for the baby and the appropriate course of action was an immediate abortion. By the next day, she’d already made an appointment with a doctor who carried out that kind of extraction clandestinely in a house in Colonia Portales—it was incumbent upon me to go with her because I didn’t want to behave like a lout and also because I wanted to be absolutely certain that the fetus would be done away with—a house that, truth be told, nobody could guess was a doctor’s office and which I was not allowed to enter—the butcher forbade entry to any third parties, according to Eva—so I waited in the car for a couple of hours, very anxious and with my mind churning a million miles an hour, the situation so tense and anomalous that at first I was afraid there would be neither doctor nor office and that we’d fallen into the clutches of a gang of thieves who would steal our money; then I thought, to calm myself down, that Eva had heard about that doctor through two of her colleagues who had already paid visits to the house that I was now keeping under surveillance. At a certain moment during my wait, I got paranoid that the police would suddenly burst into the house and arrest the doctor and his spread-eagle patients; I watched carefully through the rearview mirror to see if any suspicious characters were hanging around, and I despised living in a country that was so primitive that abortion was against the law, where I couldn’t turn to people like Don Chente or Pico Molins to extricate me from this problem. Eva walked out of the house and to the car as if everything were normal, as if she had not just undergone any kind of procedure, which made me fear that they hadn’t attended to her, but the moment she got in the car, she collapsed, broke down in horrible sobs—before saying “It’s over”—sobs that made me feel as if I’d done something wrong, when by rights we should have been pleased that it had all turned out for the best, which is what I told her, but all she could say was “It was horrible,” a statement that proved that she’d inherited from her f
ather, a progressive former priest, a culture of guilt, and that this stood above and beyond her secular education, it was in her genes, I told myself in order to put a little distance between me and the drama, though suddenly I remembered the novel about Evita Peron that I was reading at the time, which claimed that the cancer that killed her had had its origins in a botched abortion.

  “It’s not surprising that being raised by a domineering mother and grandmother would affect your own couple relationships,” Don Chente said, and then asked me to tell him any memories of my father that I did have, even though I’d already told him that I had almost no memories of my progenitor, but I soon found myself talking about my father’s passion for fireworks, for lighting firecrackers on Christmas and New Year’s, how he would buy bags of rockets, fountains, mortars, whistles, and any other kind of fireworks, which he would then set off with the greatest delight, like a little boy, how he’d spend a good part of those nights with my brother and me and the rest of the neighborhood gang, lighting firecrackers nonstop; he loved them so much that on our birthdays he’d sneak into our room early in the morning while we were still asleep and wake us up with explosions, cheers, laughter, and singing the happy birthday song, Las mañanitas. Don Chente listened to me, ensconced in his chair, the palms of his hands joined at his chin, and, even though he periodically leaned over his desk and jotted something down in his notebook, I couldn’t tell which details interested him, because I was suddenly remembering about how my father’s siesta was sacred, the house converted into a tomb under the midday heat, and my brother and I had to scratch his head, pet his head really, until his loud snores resounded—he didn’t smoke sixty cigarettes a day in vain. “Did he ever punish you harshly?” Don Chente asked, in a tone of voice that made me think that I was remembering only stupid things and that nothing essential was coming to mind. I answered that my father had never laid a hand on me, that when he got angry he punished me by making me stay in my room while my friends played in the street or in the backyard, and that it was my mother who shouted and made a fuss, though she dared hit me only once, when I was four years old, and never ran the risk of raising a hand against me again, so great was the fear my grandmother Lena—my protector, whose heir I was—inspired in all of them, I thought, but didn’t say to Don Chente, who really didn’t need to hear that from me to reach the same conclusion.

  What I also didn’t tell the old man, and maybe should have, is that the most intense memory I have of my father has nothing to do with his life but with his death, because the night he was shot in the back as he was leaving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Colonia Centroamérica, my brother and I were in bed, and the moment my mother came into our bedroom, a nervous wreck after receiving the phone call, to tell us that Papa had had an “accident” and that she was going to the hospital to be with him, and that we would stay with Fidelita, our trusted maid, and that if they weren’t home by morning, which they weren’t, we should get up, shower, eat breakfast, and take the bus to school like we did every day . . . at that very moment, as I was saying, when my mother came into our room, out of control, I had an intuition that something very important was about to change in my life, that I was about to enter unknown and dangerous territory, an intuition that produced a sensation of fear and helplessness that prevented me from sleeping peacefully that night and stayed with me the following morning, when Father Pedro, the principal of my school, came into my classroom, asked the teacher to excuse me, and instructed me to pack all my binders and books into my knapsack, then started walking by my side, his protective hand on my shoulder as he talked to me about God—I assume, though I was like a zombie so I don’t remember his words—until just before we entered the main office, when he told me that my father had died; waiting for me there was my mother’s best friend, who stood up to give me a hug, then burst into tears, though she soon pulled herself together and told me that my brother Alfredito would be joining us soon, the principal was going to get him from his classroom, but he mustn’t find out yet about our father’s death, because he was only seven years old, too young to understand, they would tell him later, after they’d prepared him, whereas I was already a young man, at eleven I should be able to control myself, not say anything or cry while we were in the car on our way to drop Alfredito off at the house of some relatives, who would look after him. And that is what happened: with a knot in my throat, I held back my tears on the way to drop off my brother, and I kept holding back my tears while my mother’s friend drove me home, even when we passed the Hospital del Seguro Social, where they’d taken my father after the “accident,” as my mother had called it the night before, after receiving the phone call; and I continued to hold back my tears the rest of the morning, at the house, where swirls of people were coming and going, and at the funeral home, where they took me at noon, where I spent the rest of the day and the whole night and the following day, still like a zombie and with a knot in my throat, holding back my tears, even when I went up to the coffin they brought in, and I could see through the little glass window the waxen face of my father, his moustache finally trimmed, and two pieces of cotton wool sticking out of his nostrils, the first dead body I’d ever seen in my life, which completely fascinated me and I went up to stare at several times, holding back my tears, still like a zombie; and when I milled around with relatives and acquaintances, surprised to see the long line of friends from Alcoholics Anonymous who filed sorrowfully past my father’s coffin, and still that afternoon when we lined our cars up to drive in a procession to the cemetery; it was then and there, when the gravediggers lowered the coffin then threw the first shovelfuls of dirt on top of it, that the knot in my throat suddenly came undone, and I rushed away from the crowd that had gathered around the gravesite and hid behind an old Kapok tree, where I finally let go of the tears I had been holding on to for so long. And I didn’t tell any of this to Don Chente because my whole life, every time I’d wanted to talk about it, the knot would again tighten in my throat, my eyes would again start burning, and I would turn back into a zombie, and now was not the time to make a scene.

  “Let’s go into the other room,” said the doctor. And that’s when I became aware of my fear at the imminent prospect of being hypnotized, a fear that took turns in my mind with the idea that the whole thing was a sham, that Don Chente wouldn’t be able to hypnotize me, but my fear as well as my incredulity stepped aside to make room for my curiosity about what method the old man would use to try to hypnotize me, which I discovered once I lay down on the exam table, anxious, my eyes glued to the ceiling, awaiting instructions, with that familiar tingly feeling, as if I were about to take my first trip on hallucinogenic mushrooms, which was the first thing that came to mind, that time we climbed the San Salvador volcano to collect the mushrooms that we then put in a jar with honey so they would lose their flavor of dirt and cow shit and that I ate with that same tingling curiosity I felt now, waiting for the psilocybin to kick in, to dismantle my psychic apparatus in order to give me access to new perceptions, surprisingly enough without any extraordinary visions or sounds but rather with a simple opening into a world beyond the senses, where I split off from my self and was able to perceive myself in all my squalor and absurdity, an experience that marked the end of my adolescence and turned out disastrously for one of us, my friend Chino’s cousin, who was “left behind,” as they used to say, having experienced so much fear at seeing himself as he was that soon thereafter he became an acolyte in a Christian sect.

  To my surprise, Don Chente didn’t use any newfangled wizardry on me, on the contrary, I had learned the same relaxation technique we now began to practice a dozen years earlier, the technique of focusing all your attention on your toes, then on the soles of your feet, then on your ankles, and likewise along every part of your body, going from your feet to your head and making each part relax through the strength of the mental energy focused on it, which is then experienced as a diaphanous feeling of levity in those relaxed parts. I had done this exercis
e once or twice alone before falling asleep without attributing much meaning to it, but now Don Chente’s voice was guiding me with precision and in a tone I hadn’t heard him use before—imperative, profound—a voice that not only indicated which part of my body I should focus on but also wove in sentences that encouraged me to apply more mental energy, so that by the time we reached my head I felt very light, almost as if I were levitating, to tell the truth, and I barely understood Don Chente’s whispers because I began to doze off and soon lost consciousness, though deep down, very deep down, there was a constant, indecipherable whispering, like a tiny blinking light in a dark, empty room.

  “Wake up!” I heard Don Chente say in a commanding voice. I opened my eyes and saw the same ceiling and then the serene face of the old man behind his tortoiseshell glasses. “Is it over?” I asked as I gained consciousness of where I was and the treatment I had undergone, surprised that the session had been so short, without a single memory of Don Chente asking me anything or of having spoken a word. “That was short, wasn’t it? How long was I asleep?” I asked as I got up to put on my loafers. Don Chente looked at his wristwatch and said impassively in his gentle, almost shy, voice: “Just about two hours.” Perhaps my bewilderment was greater because I had just emerged from a deep sleep, but when I looked at the time and saw that, indeed, I had been lying there for as long as Don Chente said, though I had no consciousness of anything that had taken place, if, that is, anything had taken place other than a deep sleep, which is what I immediately asked, now truly in the grips of anxiety; Don Chente answered that we had talked a lot, but that I shouldn’t worry if I didn’t remember anything now, that was normal, later I would remember what we had talked about—that was the process.